The writer is a professor at Ashoka University and former chief economic adviser, government of India. Josh Felman also contributed to this article

Developing countries have been given new marching orders by western economists: your successful export-led model of growth is dead, please find an alternative. If their counterparts in the developing world follow suit, the consequences are clear: without open markets, developing countries’ prospects will shrink.   

Consider some important history. The new export pessimism is, of course, not new at all. In the 1960s, Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer invoked it to argue for industrialisation through import substitution. They noted that developing countries tended to produce commodities, and argued that commodity prices inevitably trend downward. So they insisted that an export-based development strategy would simply not work. Many developing countries consequently focused on their domestic markets — and fell further behind the west.